Skylark

Howard Mansfield remembers the first time he heard about Harry Atwood. A neighbor told him, “There was this man who lived in Greenfield in the 1930s. He covered an old house top to bottom in cement and stone. He built a swimming pool, floated an airplane in the pool all winter. Took the airplane out of the pool, flew to the White House, landed right there, and had lunch with the President.” From this intriguing report—all true, though not in that order—sprang Mansfield’s five years of work on the book.

“Like most of the stories Atwood told and the ones told about him, they are made up of truth and lies,” Mansfield writes in Skylark. “But each truth and each lie is enfolded over the other like so many things in nature—flower buds, onions, tree rings, certain rock deposits. Tightly bound layers of deceit and honesty. So tight that what Harry Atwood said was at once false and true. When Harry told a story it was composed much like Duply, thin layers of wood and plastic bonded under pressure until it was so strong it could stop a bullet. So it was when Harry Atwood talked, falsehood and fact, exaggeration and honest report. A chemical formulation that might read: truth-lie-lie-truth-truth-lie.

“In all things, Harry Atwood was an inventor.”

Reviews

"“Mansfield provides an engaging account of early aviation history, and his book evokes the early part of the century when Americans embraced the promise of technology, when progress-even in the form of an airmobile-seemed possible and limitless."—Publisher’s Weekly.

Read an Excerpt

"What was it like to fly in 1911? We want to be told it was like the birds—the man-birds as they said—like the eagle and the skylark. We want to hear talk of air ruffling feathers, of floating along dreamily among the clouds. We want poetry. But flying was something altogether different. It was struts and wires, engines and oil, wind in the face, and crowds that rushed an aeroplane eager to sign their names on it or tear it apart."